¿Puede Google salvar a Jarvis y a todos nosotros?

Nick Carr [no confundir con David] describió sin inquina pero sin complacencia qué está haciendo Google por nosotros. Lo recordé tarde. Lo cuelgo ahora. Es Jarvis sin el lirio en la mano. Para el debate entre ingenuistas (Jarvis) y realistas. Bien.

A Jarvis ya lo referenció uno. Van unos extractos de Parfum de Carr. Empieza aquí:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Sigue aquí, con esta cita:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Y dale:

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Va concluyendo:

Still, their [de Google] easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Y concluye:

That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Hay que saber más alemán, amigos. Der Spiegel organizó un debate alrededor del mismo asunto: "Macht Das Internet Doof?", tema que fue portada el pasado agosto, inspirado en lo de Carr (Nick) para el 'Ideas Issue' de The Atlantic.